This invention relates to a method of producing a processed tomato product. More particularly, this invention relates to a method of producing such a processed tomato product having more tomato aroma inherent to grown tomatoes (hereinafter also referred to as “tomato fruit”).
Processed tomato products such as tomato juice, pureed tomato, tomato pastes and tomato ketchup are generally being produced by washing tomato fruit, preliminarily heating (primarily for enzyme deactivation) washed tomato fruit, extracting juice from the preliminarily heated washed material, heating (primarily for sterilization) or further condensing and similarly heating such an extracted juice after mixing. Processed tomato products thus obtained, however, still have the problem of not sufficiently having the aroma inherent to tomato fruit.
In order to produce processed tomato products sufficiently provided with tomato aroma inherent to tomato fruit, there have therefore been proposed a method of carrying out a preliminary heating process prior to crushing washed tomatoes (such as disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication Tokkai 2002-330719), a method of crushing washed tomatoes and immediately thereafter carrying out a preliminary heating process on the crushed tomatoes under a specified condition (such as disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication Tokkai 2003-179), and a method of adding tomato flavor collected from an extract of tomato fruits (such as disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication Tokkai 1-247059). Even such processed tomato products thus produced have the problem, however, that the tomato aroma inherent to tomato fruit is still far from sufficient.